Hires from Qualcomm and the former P.A. Semi could help AMD move beyond the PC.

We've been a little worried about AMD lately—demand for its CPUs is down, analysts think it's "un-investable," and it has long been playing catch-up with Intel with respect to laptop and desktop CPU performance and power consumption. The company continues to put up a fight, though: the latest evidence of this, as reported by Reuters, is that AMD is hiring Charles Matar, formerly of Qualcomm, and Wayne Meretsky, formerly of Apple and the Apple-acquired P.A. Semi. Smartphone and tablet chips are Qualcomm's bread and butter, and the P.A. Semi team is responsible for Apple's A4, A5, and A6 series of iPhone and iPad SoCs—both hires hint that AMD is looking to redouble its efforts to make low-power CPUs for use in servers and consumer products.

Matar will now serve as AMD's vice president of system-on-chip development. At Qualcomm, Matar was responsible for the Adreno hardware team that developed the GPUs for the company's Snapdragon SoC—combined with all of the GPU talent from the Radeon team, his hiring could point the way toward an SoC using an AMD CPU and GPU, rather than licensing a GPU design from the likes of ARM or Imagination Technologies. The move is ironic, in a way: while Matar himself never actually worked at AMD (at least according to his LinkedIn profile), Qualcomm's Adreno team began life as AMD's Imageon embedded graphics unit, which AMD then sold to Qualcomm in 2009.

Meretsky, on the other hand, brings software experience to the table, as befits his new role as vice president of software development: he spent two years at P.A. Semi before the Apple acquisition, managing "all aspects of hardware and software necessary to be competitive in the high-end embedded marketplace," according to his LinkedIn profile, and before that he spent nearly five years at AMD building the company's software development team and defining the x86-64 specification included in all 64-bit chips from both AMD and Intel today.

The hiring of Matar and Meretsky follows the August 2012 re-hiring of Jim Keller, who had worked on AMD's original K7 and K8 (read: Athlon and Athlon 64) architectures before moving on to P.A. Semi. Keller currently serves as corporate vice president and chief architect of CPU cores for AMD, and his experience in mobile chip making was noted at the time. The company's last CEO, Dirk Meyer, was famously ousted from the position in early 2011 by a board that was worried about AMD's absence in the growing smartphone and tablet markets.

We know for sure that AMD will be introducing ARM-based Opteron processors for servers in 2014, but we wouldn't be surprised to see AMD make a more serious, ARM-based play for the consumer end of the market at some point as they seek to become less dependent on the low-margin, slowly contracting desktop and laptop PC market. AMD's current x86-based tablet CPUs, codenamed Hondo, has been integrated into a new tablet from Vizio that the company showed off at CES—but has otherwise been mostly shut out by Intel's Atom chips and ARM-based SoCs from the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung, and others.

AMD's x86 and graphics experience would make it relatively easy to jump into ARM SoC development (at least, compared to a company with no CPU or GPU experience), but there's a chance that it's too-little-too-late. Chip development takes a long time, and competitors like Nvidia who made the decision to jump into ARM earlier have now had several chances to iterate on their early ARM designs—for some perspective, note that AMD announced its first ARM server chips a good two years before they were scheduled to ship. Still, it's encouraging to see signs of life from the company—AMD may be down, but it's not quite out.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

35 Reader Comments

Seriously though, I got my first PCs when AMD was still a major player and it saddens me to see them struggle so much. I'm not sure if this news is going to affect high performance computing, but hopefully AMD is going to have enough successes to survive and push new innovations. Intel is doing great, and hopefully I'll be soon able to run some code on their Xeon Phi, but I'd like to see more options and competitions in the field (NVIDIA is arguably a more serious competitor than AMD when it comes to high performance computing).

AMD has a chance, a chance it must take, to experiment and go places that set maufacturers and designers won't go. Show me a AMD 64-bit ARM quad core coupled with a Radeon GPU with F/OSS drivers on a ultraslim quality laptop running a flavour of Linux, and I might even think about it.

Unfortunately, being a public company with investors, they'll never do that.

Interestingly enough the new AMD seems to becoming more like the ancient AMD from the K7 days. Hopefully they'll be able to pull of a competitor to Intel's desktop CPU's if given a year or two. At the same time, AMD seems to be betting that ARM will overtake the mobile market. They were depending on Intel to get x86 a foot hold in the market where then AMD could squeeze in. However, Intel has stumbled and only slightl variations on Intel's reference x86 phone are in the market. With the next generation of Atom being delayed, Intel's hopes of being a major competitor are dwindling.

The main reason AMD announced ARM based Opterons two years in advance is that they wanted to go 64 bit. At best the first silicon featuring the 64 bit ARM cores is due out at the end of this year and that would be for parts targeted towards consumers. Server grade components require a bit more validation which means 2014. When in 2014 is another question but the overall time frame makes since considering the other factors in the market.

So 20XX and late so much betting around which be better to do if they just continued work on the Z 60 APU for pushing Atom(yawn) chips out the market (these A chips perform better on Linux it seems anyway), I wonder what kind of market AMD really want cause I cant feel the love anymore since the Athlon. Btw the 1035T is the core of my pc.

I fail to see how this is going to save them. They are failing in there bread-and-butter x86 market because of Intel domination there. So they abandon ship and try to jump into a new market that is already dominated by other vendors -Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung - and they hope to somehow just bypass the entrenched players?

Allow me to jump in on 'too little too late'. Sure, good moves, this is where they need to be going....

But, really, if they were going to introduce anything that these guys drove the engineering on, in time to make a difference, they needed to hire these guys 2 years ago.

That said, AMD really did make some intelligent decisions in the K7/K8 days, and it's nice to think of them being able to possibly leapfrog again (Custom ARM 64-bit cores that are a level above anyone else's ARM cores?) into technology leadership... but you won't catch me holding my breath.

Both AMD and Intel have had a rough year and its not going to get better anytime soon - but Intel is in so much better shape to get weather the storm. Given uncertainty all over the globe (contnued budget stalemates in Washington, Recession /Depression in Europe and lack of consumer demand in China) I don't see a lot of companies investing in computer hardware for the next year or two. Besides the recessions, PC demand is also down from consumers due to tablets and smart phone sales.

Personally I am a big fan of AMD and hope they pull through. The big question is do they have the cash to last long enough to get these products out the door.

That's got to be a decent chunk of change for them, but let's consider game console sales in context: Gartner says that all vendors combined sold 87+ million PCs worldwide in the third quarter of 2012. Microsoft recently said it had sold 70 million Xbox 360s over the console's entire life cycle, which began seven years ago.

So, while being included in a game console is certainly nice, the size of the market is much, much smaller. Probably not enough to keep a company like AMD afloat in the long-term.

It's not too late or too little. I don't like ARM, it's too fragmented and feeble for any serious work, but not everybody thinks like that. It appears that ARM servers are still quite far in the future, which gives AMD time to prepare something nice. If ARM becomes more successful in the netbook/notebook market (latest ARM chromebook anyone?) and take some part of x86 market, then they might have more chances.

In the meantime they might need some serious restructuring to survive these rough times.

So, while being included in a game console is certainly nice, the size of the market is much, much smaller. Probably not enough to keep a company like AMD afloat in the long-term.

But would Microsoft and Sony allow a supplier of critical components for which they have no second source go bust? I would think they need AMD every time they do a revision of the components AMD supplies e.g. node shrinks. I suppose they could just buy a license and let some other semiconductor company do redesign, but that sounds very sub-optimal.

That's got to be a decent chunk of change for them, but let's consider game console sales in context: Gartner says that all vendors combined sold 87+ million PCs worldwide in the third quarter of 2012. Microsoft recently said it had sold 70 million Xbox 360s over the console's entire life cycle, which began seven years ago.

So, while being included in a game console is certainly nice, the size of the market is much, much smaller. Probably not enough to keep a company like AMD afloat in the long-term.

I agree with the conclusion, but just want to point out that they are supplying the GPU for all three "next gen" consoles (Wii U, PS4, Xbox Whatever), making this a somewhat larger market than 70 million 360s. They got 170 million GPUs out of the 360 and Wii last gen. And of course they only get to sell chips for a minority of PCs in the general PC market.

(Completely disregarding here that margins and so on are totally different, of course....but it would be interesting to see the numbers.)

My gut reaction to the article title was "the guy didn't want to have to do a Qualcomm CES keynote eh?"

In all seriousness though, this is pretty good news for AMD, and as a company I hope they can dust themselves off and get back in the game. They do still offer some good value proposition for their tech, I favor AMD for my GPUs currently and price performance on some of their CPUs are pretty darn good too if you're looking at mid-range. Sure they aren't hitting the top benchmarks, but they do have reasonable stuff.

I do also wonder where the game stuff revenue comes in at compared to the rest of the business.

Many others have made good points, but to clarify: the margin on selling console CPU's is MUCH slimmer than selling consumer CPU's. The console manufacturers are your only customer, and those are very savvy customers who will bargain your margin down as low as it can go. Over the life of the console, expect that customer to track your production cost and further bargain the price down to keep your margin from growing much.

And that's not even considering the potential pitfalls of this new generation, where the console manufacturers can wave the threat of switching to Intel over AMD's head.

The idea behind true CPU/GPU fusion is really appealing, and potentially will bring us one more revolution in the ever spinning wheel of reincarnation. AMD made a gutsy move to push 64-bit CPUs before nearly anyone had a 64-bit OS, and it was the right one to make. Of course, many tech companies with good idea have failed in the past, it'll be interesting to watch.

AMD has a chance, a chance it must take, to experiment and go places that set maufacturers and designers won't go. Show me a AMD 64-bit ARM quad core coupled with a Radeon GPU with F/OSS drivers on a ultraslim quality laptop running a flavour of Linux, and I might even think about it.

Unfortunately, being a public company with investors, they'll never do that.

Linux again? Seriously? Don't beat a dead horse. People just aren't interested. Yes, a very small number might want such a thing, but not enough to make a product viable for a company like this.

The last time we were reading articles and posts about Linux finally making it into the public space was when Asus came out with the first netbooks. People bought them, and then promptly brought them back. The netbook didn't take off until Microsoft came out with the $15 license for XP Starter for netbooks.

Even you're saying that you MIGHT THink about it. Not thatt you would buy one, or even think about it, but that you might think about it. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

That's got to be a decent chunk of change for them, but let's consider game console sales in context: Gartner says that all vendors combined sold 87+ million PCs worldwide in the third quarter of 2012. Microsoft recently said it had sold 70 million Xbox 360s over the console's entire life cycle, which began seven years ago.

So, while being included in a game console is certainly nice, the size of the market is much, much smaller. Probably not enough to keep a company like AMD afloat in the long-term.

I agree with the conclusion, but just want to point out that they are supplying the GPU for all three "next gen" consoles (Wii U, PS4, Xbox Whatever), making this a somewhat larger market than 70 million 360s. They got 170 million GPUs out of the 360 and Wii last gen. And of course they only get to sell chips for a minority of PCs in the general PC market.

(Completely disregarding here that margins and so on are totally different, of course....but it would be interesting to see the numbers.)

Don't forget that Sony sold over 120 million PS2‘s. this current generation of consoles, even though it's been around 2 years longer than the last generation was current, has sold fewer. We don't know how the next generation will be doing, but it's possible that it will do even more poorly as tablets, and even phones, take over more of those sales. Selling into that market isn't a company saving move, though it will help.

Linux again? Seriously? Don't beat a dead horse. People just aren't interested. Yes, a very small number might want such a thing, but not enough to make a product viable for a company like this.

The last time we were reading articles and posts about Linux finally making it into the public space was when Asus came out with the first netbooks. People bought them, and then promptly brought them back. The netbook didn't take off until Microsoft came out with the $15 license for XP Starter for netbooks.

Even you're saying that you MIGHT THink about it. Not thatt you would buy one, or even think about it, but that you might think about it. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

We're living in a world where ARM and x86 need to get along while competing and the best platform for that is Linux. Android is more appealing to customers than Windows RT or Phone 8. ChromeOS and more are coming down the pipeline. XBMCbuntu or XMBC on Android look to be the future of HTPC's. It's exciting times and Linux is more relevant and appealing to the public, OEM's and devs a than ever before.

Linux again? Seriously? Don't beat a dead horse. People just aren't interested. Yes, a very small number might want such a thing, but not enough to make a product viable for a company like this.

The last time we were reading articles and posts about Linux finally making it into the public space was when Asus came out with the first netbooks. People bought them, and then promptly brought them back. The netbook didn't take off until Microsoft came out with the $15 license for XP Starter for netbooks.

Even you're saying that you MIGHT THink about it. Not thatt you would buy one, or even think about it, but that you might think about it. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

We're living in a world where ARM and x86 need to get along while competing and the best platform for that is Linux. Android is more appealing to customers than Windows RT or Phone 8. ChromeOS and more are coming down the pipeline. XBMCbuntu or XMBC on Android look to be the future of HTPC's. It's exciting times and Linux is more relevant and appealing to the public, OEM's and devs a than ever before.

I agree. Windows desktop on x86 still has some significant relevance due to various professional applications, but consumers are shifting a lot toward not-quite-PC devices. They don't expect these devices to work like Windows PCs or run Windows PC software, and they don't care if it's Linux or NTKernel under the hood, as long as the UI sitting on top of it is usable, and there are apps to do what they want.

I think the biggest problems with the original Linux-based netbooks were:1) People didn't really know what to expect. It was a little laptop computer, so they expected it to behave like the PCs they were used to, but smaller, and run all their software. It didn't, so they were disappointed. As much as I dislike Apple, I do have to give them credit for disrupting people's expectations so they would accept something different without complaining that it didn't run their Windows apps.2) The original Asus Linux distro was pretty awful. I had one of the original Eee Box nettops, and after only a few minutes of trying the default install, I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. Even as someone who uses Linux as my primary OS, I would have been extremely disappointed with the system if I was stuck with the original Asus Linux. Now, about 5 years later, it's still running 24/7 as a local web server on my LAN (currently running Ubuntu 12.04), and only reboots when it needs a kernel update, or when the power goes out. It's quiet, doesn't use much power, and is pretty much ideal for my use case.

Linux again? Seriously? Don't beat a dead horse. People just aren't interested. Yes, a very small number might want such a thing, but not enough to make a product viable for a company like this.

The last time we were reading articles and posts about Linux finally making it into the public space was when Asus came out with the first netbooks. People bought them, and then promptly brought them back. The netbook didn't take off until Microsoft came out with the $15 license for XP Starter for netbooks.

Even you're saying that you MIGHT THink about it. Not thatt you would buy one, or even think about it, but that you might think about it. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

We're living in a world where ARM and x86 need to get along while competing and the best platform for that is Linux. Android is more appealing to customers than Windows RT or Phone 8. ChromeOS and more are coming down the pipeline. XBMCbuntu or XMBC on Android look to be the future of HTPC's. It's exciting times and Linux is more relevant and appealing to the public, OEM's and devs a than ever before.

The situation is that Linux was never appealing, isn't appealing, and won't be appealing. If that hasn't sunk in with Linux supporters, then I suppose it never will.

It's not too late or too little. I don't like ARM, it's too fragmented and feeble for any serious work, but not everybody thinks like that.

In a previous job, I did work where I would try to partially RE come parts of ARM SoCs based on their firmware. I really wanted to learn ARM because it seems x86's days are numbered (regardless of Intel's SoC success or failure). I was looking for the registers for a particular peripheral to try and pick apart enough of its register set to do some basic interfacing. As I was just trying to find the thing, I kept wishing I could just enumerate the !@#$ bus like I can with USB or the various flavors of PCI.It might become a moot point as we accept that the only thing we can install are apps and not an OS. But maybe market forces bring things around to where there is value is being able to select hardware, then select an OS without a need to tweak and recompile any code.

The mobile (ARM) revolution is still new, hence IMO the entry to the market is comparably easier for AMD. There is not a sea of peripheral devices drivers to be worried about. Whether AMD chooses to make 32-bit or 64-bit ARM CPU is also not as daunting as it was in the case of x86/x64. So I think AMD still has a good chance to come back.

Ironically, Intel being the 800-pound gorilla in the x86 world forces AMD to a corner and leaves the giant alone (yes, with Via) in the war against ARM... They would have been better off with a partner in this fight.

Don't forget that Sony sold over 120 million PS2‘s. this current generation of consoles, even though it's been around 2 years longer than the last generation was current, has sold fewer. We don't know how the next generation will be doing, but it's possible that it will do even more poorly as tablets, and even phones, take over more of those sales. Selling into that market isn't a company saving move, though it will help.

The next generation is not looking too great to me, to be honest. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have centre stage now. Consoles are still going to appeal to hardcore gamers, but to get the regular folks they'd need to be priced rather low, I reckon. I also suspect a lot of regular gamers might just stick with a PC and not get any consoles. With console architecture is shaping up to be more and more like a typical PC, it's going to be even easier for companies to release cross platform games. So by sticking with just PC, consumers will only miss out on platform exclusive games.

Who knows, maybe the ultimate evolution of consoles would have them with the ability to run apps like tablets do, while having the raw power to play the latest games."Why buy a computer and a console when you can just buy a console that does everything you need?"

To reiterate, my point isn't that the money from the console deals will keep AMD alive, but that Microsoft and Sony need AMD alive and they have the money to make it so.

Microsoft and Sony can go to someone else for processors, they don't need AMD.

For as long as the next generation og consoles last it's hard to see how AMD's console processors can be swapped out. Next-gen console games will likely be compiled for AMD's Jaguar-inspired console CPU, with all the AMD extensions to x86 that Intel processors don't have. Even if they are compiled for a common set of x86 instructions, the Intel replacement needs to perform better than the AMD processor at nearly all tasks, which means it'll have to be vastly more powerful, since the strengths of AMD's and Intel's architectures are not the same.

So, while being included in a game console is certainly nice, the size of the market is much, much smaller. Probably not enough to keep a company like AMD afloat in the long-term.

But would Microsoft and Sony allow a supplier of critical components for which they have no second source go bust? I would think they need AMD every time they do a revision of the components AMD supplies e.g. node shrinks. I suppose they could just buy a license and let some other semiconductor company do redesign, but that sounds very sub-optimal.

This is the primary reason why I can't understand Microsoft's moves with Windows RT. Windows RT-based netbooks/laptops would be a beachhead into a post-intel PC world. I'm not saying it would be a sales success, but it's a better product that sticking full Windows and full Windows apps on Atoms or slow AMD stuff. Better battery life, less maintenance, etc. like Chromebooks. Make SSD and large trackpads mandatory, believe in the low end product. Surface as a whole is just starting, might as well experiment. Same would be true with Windows RT netbooks - and the 'Windows 8 Store Style' environment already works with kbm, so it's not like there's any development work required. They need Windows RT to be their low cost Windows license - it does less, has fewer apps, it should cost less, take out office and charge pennies, made deals to fill in the RT store. They need to find momentum somewhere.

Microsoft needs to get into the low end quickly, anywhere they can. Their 7" tablet won't be released until next holiday. Their xbox tablet probably the same. Their phones won't have a catalyst for conquest sales until Windows is actually on them - and that could be more than 4 years away. They need to understand that their old profits are going to disappear whether they sell netbooks enthusiastically or not, and commit to their competitor's strategies, either search (goog), retail (amz) or hardware (apple).

I was just saying they should do this. I guess this is the obvious move. Hopefully it pays off. I'm an AMD fan but sadly I've only purchased their product once. Hopefully they become competitive again.